[Spoilers] How I felt after completing AMFP.

[Kitsuki]

Hi all,
I apologise if I shouldn’t have made a new thread for this, but there were so many out there I wasn’t sure where to post! Also i’m sorry if I sound somewhat like a broken record, I know many threads have covered certain points i’m about to make, but I had to do this.

Second let me just say, i’m not here to whine and complain and tell Frictional games they’re failures, I am a HUGE Frictional Games fan, I think they’re a fantastic company that really know what makes a horror game and they absolutely nailed it with The Dark Descent (I bought it four times for four different people – they never asked for it, but I just needed an excuse to support FG financially).

I’ve never done this before, i’m not the type of person to openly express my opinion on a game, if I play a bad game I usually just shrug and move on, but I sincerely hope Frictional Games take what criticism they receive and learn from it. I wholeheartedly hope they continue to make more Amnesia games in the future. Also I completely understand many of you have different opinions on AMFP, and that’s fine I am not speaking for the entire Amnesia populace.

Anyway! The TLDR version: Having waited for so long for it, I was literally on the edge of my seat when it came out, and I have to admit, after completing it, the only emotion I felt was that of sheer disappointment.

We completed it in four hours, now I don’t tend to bomb through games I like to fully explore every room, every crook and cranny, but we were shocked to see how short a game it was (given how much the release date had been pushed back). We also felt a lot of the freedom you had in the Dark Descent was taken away in AMFP, given that there was no inventory system, the game clearly did not want you picking up just anything. You were only allowed to pick up what could be used in a puzzle, otherwise, everything was there for show. Whereas in the Dark Descent, I have to admit I had a lot of fun throwing random books and vials around the room! There were also a lot of invisible walls, which I can completely understand are needed to stop the player from venturing somewhere they shouldn’t be going, but on a couple of occasions we became trapped due to a bug and ended up having to reload from half an hour ago.

We did encounter quite a few bugs (we even fell through the skybox at one point) but I am not too bothered about the bugs, more about the game itself.

We went through the entire game without too much hassle. The trailer showed a pigman breaking a door down – we saw nothing like that. The encounters were rare and easy to avoid.

Where was the music! Music plays a big part in creating an atmosphere, and when you heard the trademark music in Dark Descent which meant something was near, I **** my pants! I know some of you find the eerie silence more frightening, but I was disappointed at the lack of mob music, and the flickering of the lantern merely became somewhat of an annoyance for me.

The puzzles were so easy, anything you needed was in that very room or a couple of rooms away, it never had us stumped for long.

It was far too humorous in some places, (the part where you walk into the prison section and the pig runs at you, being yanked back by its own chain, made me laugh. Also the part where you look down at the patrolling piggies, and one of them smacks the other.) It made us laugh, which is nice, but not what we were looking for in a real horror.

The infinite oil and no need for tinderboxes (I know many of you have touched on this) gave us nothing to worry about, no sense of ‘survival’ in keeping an eye on diminishing resources, same with the lack of health and insanity, we were free to do what we want, it made it very relaxed.

I liked the story, I loved the environment, but overall, we felt the game was rushed, VERY rushed. It was more of a story teller, like Dear Esther, then a horror game.

Thank you if you read all of that, as I said before, this is how I feel. I was gutted to pieces after waiting over a year for a game we finished in four hours, and i’m not making this post to complain, just to do what I don’t normally do – provide feedback, in the hope someone in Frictional Games is listening.